Archive For The “Running Free” Category
I don’t have any reminiscences, except that no matter how hard you run, it still takes an hour. No other foot race is like that. – Don Kardong The event really got my attention when Jos Hermens broke the 13-Mile barrier on May 1, 1976. The Dutchman covered 20.944 kilometers in just sixty minutes. I…
Did you ever run behind a slow pack? You get a trailing wind and a lot of body odor. – Steve Prefontaine I got the axe at Nike shortly after Zola Budd tripped Mary in the ’84 Olympic Games. The world’s leading sports apparel company has never (to-date) issued any formal comment whatsoever re a…
Kids made fun of me because I was a slow learner, because I was hyperactive, because of a lot of things. Running gave me confidence. – Steve Prefontaine No running? What the hell kind of cross-country training is that? I’m going for a run. Brooks headed out the door, the feeling of freedom and rebellion…
“Isn’t it great that our sport doesn’t need human judges? No need for us to worry about ‘artistic’ merit, no one around taking off points for our form. All we’ve got to do is just put low numbers on the objective, non-partisan, incorruptible clock. Best is least.“ I have an old friend I haven’t known…
My first sight of bigtime road racers was on Memorial Day, 1972. Greenwich. My first road race and I turned out to be faster than I thought. Short course. Most vivid memory has to be watching Amby Burfoot and John Vitale warm up for the event. They ran ten miles before the five-mile competition. Can…
This throwback merits a brief explanation. Some decades ago, I sensed a crisis of mid-life. Due to exigent – learned a new word today – circumstances, suddenly realized when I finally hit terra firma after many, many months of, umm, let’s call it ‘time-out’, I had stopped running. Stopped. Just like that. Slept for ten…
I saw this Jeff Johnson photo of Dan Dillon crossing the finish line and I had to ask, why the smile? By Dan Dillon I remember this race so well. To mix clichés, there were moments I felt like a fish out of water and in over my head at the same time. By the…
“The faster you’d go, of course, the more you get to see.“ OGORs is about an attitude as much as anything. Dan Dillon had that. He was every bit as graceful as Zatopek, some say. I think he was marvelously expressive, pushing with every fiber of his being. In his defense, when he raced cross-country,…
Wamble (verb): to twist and turn; to wriggle; to roll over. To wobble, to totter, to waver; to walk with an unsteady gait. To move unsteadily. Not all who wamble are lost. We are rolling top-speed along the Currier & Ives Scenic By-Way. Frankly, this adventure was something of a fantasy come true. Or as…
In old age one writes, if at all, what one can. – Larry McMurtry, Literary Life. If you have no idea what happened at the 2023 Boston Marathon, then this will all be new to you. If you are wondering what has taken me so long, all I can say is, I was overwhelmed by…